The day marks the 47th anniversary of the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem from Jordanian occupation during the 1967 Six Day War, and the capital’s unification since. Jordanian forces expelled the Jews from their 3,000-year-old ancient capital in 1948 during Israel’s War of Independence.

The venue for Netanyahu’s speech – at Yeshivat Mercaz HaRav Kook — was anything but accidental: In 2008, an Arab terrorist murdered eight boys and men and wounded 18 others in a shooting spree that left the learning hall and holy books covered in blood.

Netanyahu was blunt in his vows not to allow talks with the Palestinian Authority to get in the way of keeping Jerusalem united, despite diplomatic commitments to the “two-state solution” being forced on Israel by the U.S. and international community.

“Forty-seven years ago Jerusalem was reunited – that was the way it used to be and that is the way it will always be,” the prime minister stated.

Jerusalem is Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial Center), [Theodore] Herzl’s grave (the founder of Zionism – in the military cemetery at Mt. Herzl), and the Mount of Olives, where both my grandmother and grandfather are buried, as well as [former Prime Minister] Menachem Begin and our forefathers,” Netanyahu said.

“Jerusalem is also Har Tzion (Mt. Zion) and Har (Mount) Moria (the Temple Mount) and Jerusalem is the Western Wall – Israel eternal!”

Netanyahu vowed to keep Jerusalem united, saying, “Jerusalem is our heart, and we preserve our heart – the heart of the nation – and we will never divide our heart. Never!”

Man begins with the tribe. The tribe is his earliest civilization. It is enduring because it is based on blood. The ties of blood may hinder its growth, the accretion of tradition holds it to past wisdom while barring the way to learning new things, but it provides its culture with a physical culture.

The modern world embraced post-tribalism, the transcendence of tribe, to produce more complicated, but also more fragile cultures. And then eventually post-tribalism became counter-tribalism.

Our America is tribal, post-tribal and counter-tribal. It is a strange and unstable mix of all these things.

The post-tribal could be summed up by the melting pot, a modernist idea of a cultural empire, the E pluribus unum of a society in which culture could be entirely detached from tribe, manufactured, replicated and imposed in mechanical fashion. The counter-tribal and the tribal however are best summed up by multiculturalism which combines both selectively.

Modernism was post-tribal. It believed that advancement lay with abandoning the tribe. Post-modernism however is counter-tribal. It doesn’t just seek to leave the tribe behind, but to destroy the very notion of one’s own tribe as the source of evil, while welcoming the tribalism of the oppressed.

The post-tribal and counter-tribals both felt that the rejection of one’s own tribe was a cultural victory. But where the modernists thought that tribe itself was the evil, the post-modernists think that it is only their tribe that is the evil. The modernists had no more use for the tribalism of any culture than that of their own. The post-modernists however believe that the tribalism of oppressor cultures is evil, but that of oppressed cultures is good. And so they replace their own tribalism and post-tribalism with a manufactured tribalism of the oppressed consisting of fake African proverbs and “Other” mentors.

Counter-tribalism is obsessed with the “Other”. It regards the interaction with the “Other” as the most socially and spiritually significant activity of a society. Counter-tribalists instinctively understand diversity as a higher good in a way that they cannot express to outsiders. They may cloak it in post-tribal rhetoric, but the emotion underneath is the counter-tribal rejection of one’s own identity in search of a deeper authenticity, of the noble savage within.

For the modernists, tribalism was savage and that was a bad thing. For the post-modernists, the savage was a good thing. The savage was natural and real. He was a part of the world of tribe and blood. A world that they believed that we had lost touch with. It was the civilized man and his modernism that was evil. It was the tribalism of wealth and technology that they fought against.

The modernists believed that culture was mechanical, that it could be taken apart and put back together, that fantastic new things could be added, the boundaries pushed into infinity in the exploration of the human spirit. The post-modernists knew better. Culture was human noise. Boundaries defined culture. When they were broken, there was only the fascinating explosion of anarchy and private language. Communications broke down and elites took over. They stepped outside those boundaries and lost the ability to create culture, instead they went seeking for the roots of human culture, for the tribal and the primitive, hoping to become ignorant savages again.

The modern left has become a curious amalgam of the modern, the post-modern and the savage. There you have a Richard Dawkins knocking Muslims for their lack of Nobel prizes and then side by side is the post-modern sneering at the idea that being celebrated by the Eurocentric culture and its fetishization of technology matters compared to the rich cultural heritage of Islam and the savage on Twitter demanding Dawkins’ head.

The same scenes play out on daily commutes in modern cities, where Bloombergian post-tribal social planners exist side by side with Occupier counter-tribals and violent tribal gangs acting as flash mobs in the interplay of liberalism, the left and the failed societies left behind by the systems of the left.

Muslim immigration is a distinctly counter-tribal project. The European tensions over it among its elites, as opposed to the street protesters who make up groups such as the EDL, is a conflict between the post-tribals who envisioned the European Union and the counter-tribals who view it as a refugee camp that will melt down the last of Europe’s cultures and traditions.

Egypt’s interim vice president, Mohamed ElBaradei, resigned today in response to the violent crackdown of security on Islamist protest camps set up in support of deposed president Mohamed Morsi, Reuters reports.

ElBaradei wrote in his resignation letter that “the beneficiaries of what happened today are those who call for violence, terrorism and the most extreme groups.”

“As you know, I saw that there were peaceful ways to end this clash in society, there were proposed and acceptable solutions for beginnings that would take us to national consensus,” he wrote. “It has become difficult for me to continue bearing responsibility for decisions that I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear. I cannot bear the responsibility for one drop of blood.”

MK to be Moshe Feiglin, who made the number 14 spot on the Likud Knesset list, on Monday morning managed to surprise many yet again when he showed up on Temple Mount with a minyan and conducted a prayer service.

For years, Israeli governments, police and, naturally, the Arab Waqf, have been preventing Jews visiting Temple Mount, warning that such an attempt on the part of Jews to connect with their father in Heaven would surely start never-before-seen riots that would sweep the Middle east in rivers of blood.

Nevertheless, despite those apocalyptic warnings, there are no actual laws on the books explicitly prohibiting prayer – because that would be a blatant violation of several Geneva conventions and UN human rights declarations, to say the least. And so the prohibitions against Jews praying at the site of our forefathers’ Temple hide behind ordinances against disorderly conduct, with the cops on the spot empowered to interpret the rules as they see fit.

On Monday morning, as documented by the Channel 10 News camera, Feiglin davened with a minyan on Temple Mount and the world did not erupt in flames. Even the Muslims preferred to keep mum about it.

Feiglin’s statement regarding the event was posted on his Facebook page after his primary election a week ago: “This is just the beginning, until we arrive at building the Temple on top of Temple Mount, and accomplish our goals in this land.”

A lie once told seems to be repeated over and over again. Once again, it is the story of a small Palestinian child swapping up blood. And so, they post, “oh god, Gaza…” but no, it wasn’t Gaza – not then, not now.

The original tweet:

And the picture to which they refer:

A lie repeated many times – is still a lie.The picture isn’t from now. It wasn’t from March, 2012. The picture isn’t from Gaza. The blood wasn’t from his brother. The Israelis weren’t involved. It is a young Palestinian boy told to wipe up the blood of a cow slaughtered in his family’s slaughterhouse in Hebron.

Suddenly, I received all of these phone calls from journalists asking me to talk about who murdered the late Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. The news peg is that he’s being dug up to see if someone poisoned him. Guess who?

I tell them that in a sense Arafat was murdered. Excited, they ask who did it. And I respond: Fatah, the PLO, and the Palestinian Authority, all organizations that Arafat headed. I don’t mean literally that they set out to kill Arafat but they were the ones really responsible for his death. Let me elucidate.

For many months before he was rushed to Paris for medical attention, everyone who followed him closely knew Arafat was sick. It was the subject of extensive discussion among Israelis and Palestinians. Anyone who saw him give a speech, whether live or on television, could see he was in bad shape. My mother-in-law, a doctor, saw him in one broadcast and easily rattled off a list of symptoms.

I was told the following story–in far more detail–not long after by a very reliable person who witnessed the conversation. One of Arafat’s Palestinian doctors and a leading Israeli physician were chatting at a conference. An Israeli reporter noted for his left-wing ideology and remarkably inaccurate story came up to the Palestinian and asked if Arafat was ill. “Definitely not,” he told the reporter who, well-pleased, rushed off to write up his scoop. The Israeli turned to the Palestinian and said, “But ____, you know he’s very ill.” The Palestinian medico responded, “Of course!”

Yet despite this fact, Arafat did not receive serious or competent treatment. It was no secret that the individuals who served as his medical staff were not very good doctors but chosen for political reasons. The biggest problem, however, was that the Palestinian leadership could not face the crisis honestly.

Remember, Arafat was their leader for as long as they could remember. He was well-known for making every decision, even the most minor, for the movement and for the institutions then governing the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians in the know frequently pointed out that when Arafat was travelling literally nothing could get done.

So how could they face or admit the potential demise of the man on whom their fortunes and indeed the entire movement seemed to rest? Dictatorial movements or countries are like that. The courtiers all live in fear that the fearless leader will be no more. What will become of them?

And so if they had taken better care of Arafat he would have lasted longer. Of course, Arafat was never known for being solicitous of his own help. He was overweight, ate unhealthy food (honey was his cure-all), and didn’t exercise. The mere thought of Arafat trying to jog makes the last point effectively. He had been severely injured in a plane crash several years earlier.

Arafat himself refused to rest or to leave his headquarters despite its being under siege by Israel after all the terrorism he had ordered during his post-Camp David summit war against the peace process. It was not hard to see that this 75-year-old man was a mortality waiting to happen.

Just as Arafat’s cronies and lieutenants could not face his sickness, a good portion of the Western leftist, media, and intelligentsia refuses to face their own sickness. Only against the Jews would the modern-day version of ritual murder become credible, especially when it is based on a ridiculously obvious fabrication.

The current Arafat-was-murdered meme began when very large amounts of radioactive material were “discovered” on his clothing. This substance is scientifically known to break down on a very regular schedule. For such a quantity to be found there would have meant there would have been a gigantic amount—was he hosed down with radioactive poison?—when he died eight years ago. In other words, the stuff had been planted only hours at most before it was found, no doubt by the same people who put it there. In short, the accusation makes no sense but it is being treated seriously.

Such is the way Israel is dealt with on many things by respectable people in the West. The accusation is made by anti-Israel propagandists who spew out the most vicious antisemitic hatred and lies yet are given a large measure of credibility. Such is the way Israel is dealt with on many things by otherwise respectable people in the West nowadays.

Many wars are cemented in our memories by the songs that were about or popularized during the days of battle. The Civil War had the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “Yankee Doodle,” World War I had “Over There,” and for World War II it was The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and also “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” Over time, the more popular wartime songs became protest songs. Strong protest songs were ubiquitous during the Vietnam war, expressing the anti-war sentiments, which became especially pervasive during the Vietnam War. Just one example from that era is the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a riff on Kohelet 3:1-8.

And now we have the Hamas-Israel offensive of 2012. It, too, has inspired a fighting song. This one is both a throwback to the jingoistic style of the earlier wars, but with a pulsing rap beat. Oh, and it practically drips blood.

The first original song to come out of the 2012 Hamas-Israel offensive has a hard rap beat, grainy graphics and a title that delivers the message, without any subtlety: “Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv.”

Thanks to the location and translation services of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), we have access to the lyrics written by the two “West Bank” authors.

The lyrics pulse with typical Middle Eastern themes of dominance and fear of humiliation.

The refrain, “Strike a Blow at Tel Aviv” is repeated early and often, but the hopes expressed are more expansive. In addition to extolling the virtues of grinding Israel into the ground and disdaining the concept of a ceasefire, the musicians take several x-rated swipes at Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The song also ridicules the Gulf States – the oil-rich Arab countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman – for their stately but meaningless conferences and their reliance upon NATO.

Some of the boasting in the lyrics are fantasies, such as Hamas having downed an Israeli warplane, but the urban legend has already taken off on a life of its own.

Here are excerpts from the lyrics:

We don’t want to truce or solution, All we want is to STRIKE TEL AVIV.

Here is the breaking news,We shot down the plane,And the pilot is missing.

We have downed their airplane,And filled up their air raid shelters.

My entire people cry out loud,STRIKE A BLOW AT TEL AVIV.

Oh Gulf States, shut up,All you are good at is convening conferences,Those lowlifes are not the same blood as me.

The Gulf States and all their billions,Are tough only with NATO’s support.